Revision as of 15:19, 6 May 2005

Contents

Card features

Cardbus interface

SAA7135HL chip

ALPS TSZE1 tuner

TV, Composite, and S-Video inputs

How to make it work

Kernel

As of 2.6.11.8, the stable Linux kernel hasn't got the necessary
code patched in. Although it will detect the card automatically, it
won't work. If you use a developer kernel or some distro kernel, it
might work.

As a quick test, insert your card and have a look at dmesg output.
You should see all of the following:

The card is detected as Terratec Cinergy 400 mobile (card=47).

A tuner chip is found at 0xC0, tuner type is set to 12 (Alps TSBE5).

TDA9885/6/7 is found at 0x84.

After inserting the card, lsmod should tell you that saa7134, tuner, and
tda9887 modules have been loaded automatically.

If any of the above is missing, you'll have to update/hack/patch your kernel.
See this page
for more details.

Viewers

You should get a clean picture with any decent TV application, e.g. xawtv or
tvtime. However, most applications are not able to get the sound right (If anybody
knows why that is, your contribution is highly welcome...)

The best application to watch TV at the moment is mplayer. You could for example use
a command like this (the following part is quoted from a posting by Uros Vampl on the
v4l mailing list):

channels=<list>: The list of channels is in the form of <chan1>-<chan1_name>,<chan2>-<chan2_name>, etc. For example:

channels=E7-ORF_1,23-ORF_2,SE8-Sat.1,SE12-Pro_7, etc.

Video filters (-vf)

crop=690:552: Crop away the garbage that is usually at the edges of a tv picture.

pp=li: Linear interpolation deinterlacer. It has very little CPU usage, while producing an acceptable picture. Look at the MPlayer manpage for other deinterlacers. A very good deinterlacer for example is kerndeint.

-aspect 4/3: Sets the correct aspect ratio of the picture.

The default keys for switching channels are 'h' and 'k'. If you don't specify a channels list, mplayer will switch through all channels in the frequency range specified by the chanlist option.

Sound does not work right away, you need to switch the mixer to line1,
for example with umix:

umix -d /dev/mixer1 line1 R

While tvtime cannot handle sound, you can use sox. Just start tvtime and then sox, like this: